Optimising Your Website for Voice Searches

Voice-activated assistants are all the rage these days—Lenovo, Alibaba, and Samsung are just a few of the regional tech giants that have invested heavily in the technology to bring their smart speakers and phones to the masses. While seemingly niche upon their first introduction to the market, voice assistants have actually become extremely influential in the way that individuals navigate the internet. By leveraging the search capabilities of these smart assistants, consumers are able to ask questions, search for content, find the businesses closest to them, and more without ever having to even pick up or look at their phones.

Understandably, then, this has begun to throw a wrench in the SEO strategies that most businesses are accustomed to. Instead of relying solely on visual indicators such as keywords or rankings on SERPs, website content now has to also accommodate spoken questions. Today’s article is going to the explore the ways that you can optimise your website for this growing number of voice searches in order to capitalise on the newest browsing habits of increasingly hands-off consumers.

Understand how people ask questions. Voice searches are much different than text searches. Not only are they longer, they also happen to be much vaguer, relying on the capabilities of the technology to “fill in the blanks,” so to speak. For example, customers often end queries about specific businesses with the clause “near me” in order to ensure appropriate results—this forces the voice assistant to use built-in GPS signals to first locate the individual in question before delivery responses. Fittingly, then, if you were to try and capitalise on a large local market, it would be wise to include highly specific contact information on your site so that the algorithm could identify—and present—your business to curious locals.

This goes for all voice searches—consumers initiating them often want highly specific pieces of information. Try to include as many details about your site as possible in the content, and include as much of it as possible in the form of a question. FAQ pages are ideal for this, as the answers directly addresses the questions people might have about your products or services.

Adjust layouts to facilitate crawling. While it may seem arbitrary at times, search engines actually make great efforts to efficiently present information upon the completion of a search—contrary to what some may think, these efforts extend further than just your page titles. In fact, algorithms work incredibly quickly to crawl through entire site pages in order to assess how appropriate your content is to the search in question. The speed of this process plays a role as well. The longer it takes to decipher the purpose of your content, the less likely you are to experience high rankings on SERPs. This means that marking up and structuring your content effectively is of the utmost importance.

While this is undoubtedly important for regular searches, it’s an absolutely vital step to take when it comes to voice queries. When conducted on a mobile phone, digital assistants typically only present up to three results—any missteps in your voice SEO could stop you from being one of these top-ranked results.

Adopt a mobile-first mindset. Voice assistants are starting to make waves in traditional computing contexts, but relatively few users are actively conducting voice searches on Windows or MacOS. Mobile is still the primary driver of voice-activated digital assistants, which means that optimising your content to account for this requires creating responsive websites that can be intuitively navigated through a touch-screen interface.

Diversify for various search engines. It goes without question that Google absolutely dominates other search engines when looking at the world as a whole, but that doesn’t mean that you should be satisfied with catering to the needs of just one specific search engine. Usage in Southeast Asia, in particular, fluctuates wildly between the various countries. It’s important to keep this in mind during your initial efforts—stay flexible, and, if time persists, implement the strategies that will get you ranking highly on more than one search engine. The extra effort put in now will undoubtedly pay off in the future.

As more and more consumer-grade devices become “smart”—that is, powered by computer chips that can connect to the internet—voice searches will continue to become increasingly influential, and businesses are the ones that will pay the price. As competition stiffens, it will become extraordinarily difficult for late adopters to catch up to the rest of the field. It’s therefore incredibly important that you start optimising your content for voice searches now—wait any longer, and it might be too late to truly stand out from the rest of the crowd.